my 2 cents here: there is a vast vast vast gulf of difference between publishers who publish authors like ben okri, whose circuit of distribution and sales is enormously different from the less global presses; and that circuit too is vastly different from those that are small or local, or that are published in one particular african country or another, or elsewhere in the world where black authors or african authors or caribbean authors etc etc are published.
why throw all this into one basket? why speak of one audience, instead of many different audiences or readers? why define them by race instead of region or location? after all, the expat african authors are much closer in style and preoccupation to those whose country they inhabit than those with the same skin color but who live in different countries.
the totalizing reading given to race expunges the powerful markers of difference based on place, language, and even class.
lastly, every press is guided by its editors, and they, too, by the committees that finalize decisions on what is to be published. the books don't appear magically. yet over and over i read comments that ignore this, and assume there is some strict guiding principle--be it the tastes or race of the putative audience, or the malificent mercenary interests of the publishers. but it isn't so simple. the large presses must be driven by global capitalist factors; the smaller one, university presses, not particularly the case.
i want to briefly allude to the paper i gave at the last Afr Stud Assn conference on teju cole's 2 novels
first he published Every DAy is for the Thief in nigeria, to a local audience, with a local press.
then he went to ny, lived there long enough to become a new yorker, and published Open City to wild, deserved success
then his new global, world lit publisher RE-publishes Every Day, rewrites the back flap with info different from the previous 2 books, clearly made some changes from the original ms., and tried to pass it off as world lit, no longer local.
the same book, republished, became something different!!
you have to work that into the formula. books don't publish themselves, don't appear by themselves. like movies they are packaged and marketed, and become different as a result.
the audience is a factor, but it is also what it is because of the production, i.e., the packaging and distribution--just like the movies.
ben okri doesn't address these things; he plays the author game, the auteur game, which imagines the author is the creator of the baby. but she isn't; there were ancestors before there were babies, and what was born had to have been birthed by someone who was already there beforehand--always already there, as the post-structuralists would say.
and in the end, ironically, ikhide will have the last word as books will continue to fade away and be replaced by e-books, and we will have been arguing over a dying art
ken
--In his recent Guardian essay, "A mental tyranny is keeping black writers from greatness", Ben Okri laments the "tyranny of subject" over black and African writers, and gives instructions for achieving greatness. Black and African writers, writes Okri, must attain "mental freedom": we must stop writing about "overwhelming subjects" such as slavery, colonialism, poverty, and war.
For Okri, mental tyranny is defined by repetition and prescription: the problem with black fiction is the repetition of overwhelming subjects, which is prescribed by the demands of a white reading public. It is odd, then, that his essay consists almost entirely of repetition and prescription. His piece immediately recalls Helon Habila's review of NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names, published last year, also in the Guardian, in which Habila worries that African fiction is being distorted by an aesthetic of suffering. It recalls Njabulo S Ndebele's objection to South Africa's literature of "spectacle" in the 1980s ("Rediscovery of the Ordinary"), and Gerald Moore's longing for more "private and particular observation" from Francophone African writers in the 1960s ("Towards Realism in French African Writing"). The charge that black and African writing is too political dismisses, with one blow, both the world we live in and the possibilities of political literature. It's beyond depressing to hear a writer of Okri's stature, who himself writes powerfully about overwhelming subjects, board this broken-down train.
As for the prescription: if, as Okri insists, "we must not let anyone define what we write", why should black and African writers listen to Ben Okri? The essay's demands and commands make it impossible to read as the expression of a quest for freedom. This being the case, I choose to focus on what does make sense in the essay, which is the inflated role of the white reading public. In order to address this subject, I must, like Okri, reduce my field of vision to a very specific section of black and African letters. I must forget the diversity of black writing; I must forget that there is writing in indigenous African languages; I must forget black and African thrillers, science fiction, and romance, and the innovative and varied work showcased by journals like Kwani?, Saraba, Chimurenga, and Jalada.
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/30/african-writers-instructions-ben-okri
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